adversity.  It had its origin in the necessities of disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit.  Under its benign influences, these great interests immediately awoke, as from the dead, and sprang forth with newness of life.  Every year of its duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; and although our territory has stretched out wider and wider, and our population spread farther and farther, they have not outrun its protection or its benefits.  It has been to us all a copious fountain of national, social, personal happiness.  I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind.  I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder, I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it shall be broken up and destroyed.  While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children.  Beyond that I do not seek to penetrate the veil.  God grant that, in my day at least, that curtain may not rise.  God grant that, on my vision never may be opened what lies behind.  When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!  Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured,—­bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart—­Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

* * * * *

From the “Speech at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Bunker Hill Monument.”

=_86._= OBJECT OF THE MONUMENT.